Some more evidence of long-term psychosocial harms from receiving false-positive screening mammography results.

Context A systematic review published 6 years ago concluded that receiving falsepositive mammography results had harmful and long-term psychosocial consequences. At the time, the harms of screening tests were well known only to researchers, some groups in charge of various guidelines and, perhaps, a few journalists. The world has fundamentally changed. Today we have social movements, like ‘Choosing Wisely’ and entire books, like ‘Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health’, that are devoted to helping the public understand that screening tests can harm as well as help. Harms from screening tests are potentially a very large problem. In the USA, around half of women screened by mammography regularly over a 10-year period can expect to receive abnormal results at least once, and 9 in 10 of these results will be false-positives. The popularity of cancer screening coupled with the high likelihood of receiving falsepositive results, add urgency to the important task of understanding the physical and psychological consequences that can result from the screening cascade. Researchers have extensively studied the physical harms resulting from screening, but they have given little attention to the psychological harms of cancer screening tests other than mammography. Furthermore, we know much less about the trajectory of harm over years.